Monthly Archives: April 2016

  • M

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Fritz Lang (1931)

    This picture was Lang’s first in sound.  Eighty-one years on, has there been another film that’s gone further in dramatising the passion of a compulsive serial killer or the natural feelings of an outraged public – a public energised by vengeful esprit de corps?  That kind of rhetorical question is a dangerous one for someone with filmgoing experience as limited as mine to ask:  there is an answer to it though I don’t know what it is.  I can say only that I don’t remember seeing a movie that’s in these respects more daring.  The child killer Hans Beckert is based – according to Philip Kemp, who introduced the BFI screening of M in characteristically discursive style – on Peter Kürten, the ‘Vampire of Düsseldorf’.  Compare Peter Lorre’s portrait of Beckert with, for example, Anthony Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter – a performance which is rightly admired but which has a theatrical shaping that gives the audience a safe distance from Lecter’s words and deeds.  (Besides, he is – most of the time – behind bars.)  When you first see Peter Lorre on the streets of the German city that’s being terrorised by Beckert he looks so extraordinary you feel that anyone would spot and suspect him a mile off.  This is not an anonymous-looking man who can merge into the background.  Then you realise it’s the fat baby face and protruding eyes, the strange combination of tubbiness and shapelessness of his overcoated trunk that disarm suspicion:  Hans Beckert’s appearance is too ridiculous to take seriously.

    There are many wonderful passages in M.  These include, just for starters:  the opening elimination game played by children in the street, with a chant about the murderer;  the balloon that flies away after Beckert has met his next victim, Elsie Beckmann;  the quickly changing moods, induced by the sounds of a cuckoo clock, of Elsie’s waiting mother, who has prepared a meal for the little girl’s return home from school; the innocent old man who offers help to a child and is set upon by a suspicious crowd.  Lang’s camera moves relentlessly around the city’s streets and architecture – there’s a particularly startling image of a disused building with broken glass in the windows.  After an unsuccessful approach to another child, Beckert sits in an arboured street cafe, thwarted and reprieved.  Just before picking up Elsie Beckmann, Beckert was whistling ‘The Hall of the Mountain King’ from Grieg’s Peer Gynt.  When he hears that tune whistled again, the blind balloon-seller alerts one of his beggar friends, who tails Beckert then chalks an ‘M’ on his overcoat.  (The ‘M’ stands for Mörder.)  Beckert’s reaction to the sight of the letter and the sounds of his pursuers preface a terrifying chase sequence.  This is perhaps the first time in the picture that you realise that, while you want Beckert caught, you’re ambivalent about the way he’s treated by the combined forces of the police, organised crime and the bereaved mothers of Beckert’s victims.  (Elsie’s mother speaks the closing line of M so that the film ends on an unanswerable diminuendo.)

    If I had to find fault with M, I’d say that the juxtaposition of the methods of the police and those of the local underworld (whose business is being interrupted by frequent police raids designed to find the child killer) is rather protracted, and the complacency of the police occasionally overdone. There’s also the usual difficulty for me of the unique timbre of Teutonic yelling.  I couldn’t help thinking how often these brutal sounds were heard by people on the receiving end of the Nazis in the years immediately after M was made.  But this is a superb film – at one level it’s a richly detailed police procedural but it is so much more.  The melodramatic power of Beckert’s trial before a kangaroo court in the bowels of an abandoned distillery, and of Peter Lorre’s acting, is deeply impressive.   The screenplay was written by Lang with Thea von Harbou.

    19 November 2012

  • Please Give

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Nicole Holofcener (2010)

    Slender and acrid – the combination makes Please Give a dispiriting movie.  All the way through, the music by Marcelo Zarvos is thinly, wryly hopeful – it contradicts the harshness of the hostile verbal exchanges and the hurt that the characters do to each other.   Kate and Alex live in New York City with their teenage daughter Abby.  They run a furniture business; their stock is bought from people who are winding up the estate of their recently deceased parents or partners.  Kate and Alex have bought the apartment next to their own and are waiting for its elderly tenant Andra to die.  One of their clients mutters that they’re ‘ambulance chasers’ – Kate tries to assuage her guilt by demonstrating a social conscience, anxiously and clumsily.  Andra has two diametrically opposed granddaughters whose jobs reflect their moral substance, or lack of it:  conscientious, caring Rebecca is a breast cancer radiographer; brittle, selfish Mary is a cosmetologist.  At its best Nicole Holofcener’s writing has a Woody Allenish wit.  Leaving a ritzy restaurant with Alex and Abby, Kate – who takes pity on street people automatically – sees a black man standing outside and presses money into his hand.  He informs her, with puzzled irritation, that he’s in the queue for a table.  There are times when Holofcener’s direction of the cast – the sense we get of overhearing conversations rather than of hearing actors projecting lines – also calls to mind Robert Altman, albeit thinly-textured Altman.   But Please Give is too schematic and – although there’s a lot in it about death – too shallow to be satisfying.

    In this film the people too often say incredibly candid things to one another – most notably Mary, who reminds Andra, not succinctly, that she hasn’t long to live.   The bits involving a Latino couple in another adjacent apartment are horribly harsh not because they’re incisive but because the nastiness seems mechanical.  It’s true that these eruptions of malice have impact because they interrupt other characters’ attempts at polite conversation or decent behaviour but Holofcener doesn’t follow this through by making comedy or drama out of the fact that the nicer people prefer to pretend that the cruel words never got said.  The most interesting part of Please Give comes when Kate acts on her need to do more to salve her conscience, through voluntary work.  She goes to an old people’s home but she can’t be upbeat or ignore the insistent atmosphere of impending death.  The woman who interviews Kate stresses the importance of keeping conversation with the geriatrics ‘light’; Kate thinks that death ‘surely needs to be talked about’.   Then she tries a centre for teenagers with Down’s syndrome etc:  their conditions reduce her to helpless tears.   It’s an advantage that the actress who plays Kate is one who seems incapable of falseness – and Catherine Keener is particularly good in these sequences.  It’s frustrating, though, that Holofcener doesn’t go further in exploring the selfishness of Kate’s altruism.   The film ends with Andra’s funeral and with Kate relenting and allowing Abby get the $200 jeans she covets.  Unless I missed it, Holofcener skates over the question of what will happen now to the furniture business – or whether Kate can take a break by concentrating her energies on how to do up the now vacant apartment next door.   She seems anyway to have learned that generosity begins at home – and that that may be a safer option.  (The exhortation of the film’s title has multiple meanings.)

    Rebecca Hall (Rebecca) is remarkably different from role to role but, so far, consistently admirable:  she really thinks her characters out.  One thing that stays in your mind after watching Hall is her height, and how it can seem both heroic and comical, although the comedy here is pretty broad when Rebecca is paired off with a very short man – Eugene, the nephew of one of her breast cancer patients.  As Abby, whose brain and tongue are in better shape than her skin, Sarah Steele has a nice emotional range.  You want more of Rebecca’s pedantic, short-lived blind date (Paul Sparks) and Eugene (Thomas Ian Nicholas) – thanks to the actors rather than the way their roles are written.  You want less of the unremittingly unkind Mary, even though you can’t really blame Amanda Peet:  Holofcener gives her no scope for being anything but vicious.  Ann Guilbert’s acidity as Andra seems meant to show us how Mary inherited her spitefulness.  Refusing to sentimentalise the old woman may be good in theory but, because she is old (the actress is in her early eighties), you can’t help feeling sorry for what she’s subjected to.  Oliver Platt is amusing enough as Alex but his character isn’t well developed and the affair between Alex and Mary, and Abby’s discovery of it when she goes to Mary for a facial, is the clumsiest episode in the picture.  Nicole Holofcener really has it in for Mary – so much so that she won’t even let her be competent at her all-on-the-surface job.  After an hour of Mary’s treatment, Abby’s face is even more of a mess than it was before.

    28 June 2010

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